Time has not been kind to Howard Brenton’s drama, which back in 1976 was the inaugural production in the National Theatre’s Lyttelton space and is here revived for the first time. An examination of British Seventies socialism in relation to the history of, and fall-out from, communism in Eastern Europe, it is without doubt a politically committed piece. But it is also schematic and baldly polemical, its youthful working-class firebrands and their naive brand of Trotsky-influenced idealism difficult to credit, and harder still for a 21st-century audience to connect with.
These would-be revolutionaries are workers at an ailing crisp factory, which in the main supplies snacks to pubs - a nice archetypically British touch.
With trade declining, the factory, owned by a champagne-swilling poetry-lover and his spoilt wife, is faced with closure. Led by a sparky and articulate young woman, Jan, the factory workers strike in an attempt to save their jobs. Reluctantly swept up in their cause is Josef Frank, an exile from Czechoslovakia formerly imprisoned, tortured and subjected to the Stalinist Slansky show trial of 1952, and based upon a real-life Czech government minister who was, in fact, executed.
Brenton persuasively conveys the tension between romanticised notions of revolution and the brutal realities of left-wing history. In Jan’s urging of the traumatised Frank to forget the past - “just wipe it out” - there’s zeal and a hunger for a radically reshaped future coupled with a reluctance to learn the lessons of the past. And the concerns of the young Britons spring from details that personalise the political - a man’s fury at his own illiteracy, and a pretty girl’s decision that it would be easier to forget about working altogether and find a solvent man to marry. But the characters, and their world of working-class solidarity, punk-rock defiance and socialist union reps, remain as stubbornly flat as slogan-daubed placards on a protest march.
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Nathan Curry’s production displays some flashes of invention; industrial pallets form the strikers’ barricade or are transformed into motorbikes on the roaring ride to a secret political pow-wow. The acting, though, is erratic. Hilton McRae as Josef Frank has a haunted, broken quality, but his Czech accent is distractingly wayward, while there’s more swagger than sincerity to most of the other performances. Altogether uninvolving.
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